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Research-practice partnerships between filmmakers and social scientists can help: Produce effective and engaging documentaries on complex science + society issues Fill gaps in social science research on the impact of films, and how films can reach traditionally missed audiences This poster was presented at the 2021 NSF AISL Awardee Meeting. ...

The Wayne State University Math Corps is a mathematics enrichment and mentoring program that operates during summers and on Saturdays. The curriculum and the pedagogies in this informal learning program have documented success of supporting youths' mathematics learning as well as raising achievement levels in school. Through rigorous research and evaluation, this project seeked to analyze and understand the nature, extent,...

This poster presented at the 2021 NSF AISL Awardee Meeting describes the goals of a five-year CAREER AISL project that brings together researchers, educators, designers, and facilitators to investigate how families exercise their agency in museum settings, and how science center exhibits can give families greater authority as STEM learners. The project involves 1) research studies exploring how family groups express agency...

Trauma infiltrates all of society – including museums. For guests, the trauma may lie in the context of the visit or what they bring with them from their everyday lives. Staff can develop trauma through daily interaction with stressful content or secondary trauma through interaction with traumatized guests. During the COVID19 pandemic, trauma also developed from workplace issues regarding personal...

Empathy is a critical part of the engineering design process. It allows engineers to more deeply understand their clients’ perspectives and design solutions that meet the needs of diverse stakeholders. Studies also show that reframing engineering education to prioritize empathy for others can counteract stereotypes of engineering as impersonal and invite a wider range of identities into the field. This...

The ICBOs (Independent Community-based Organizations), a group of fifteen community representatives from communities historically excluded from the sciences, share results from eight years of community-led de-colonial participatory action research. We wrote this white paper to share our findings and recommendations with funders like the National Science Foundation. These findings, recently published in BioScience (https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biac001), along with preliminary results from our current research,...

This poster was presented at the 2021 NSF AISL Awardee Meeting. Our overarching goal is to better understand the particulars of how and why youth co-make in life-based and STEM-rich ways with families and communities, such that we can better infrastructure community-based maker programs in support of youth learning and well-being. ...

Two critical challenges in science education are how to engage students in the practices of science and how to develop and sustain interest. The goal of this study was to examine the extent to which high school youth, the majority of whom are members of racial and ethnic groups historically underrepresented in STEM, learn the skills and practices of science...

This is an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology, under the program Broadening Participation of Groups Under-represented in Biology. The fellow, Robert Habig, is conducting research and receiving training that is increasing the participation of groups underrepresented in biology. The fellow is being mentored by David Lahti at Queens College, City University of New York. The goal of the fellow's...

PocketMacro is a mobile app designed by The Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University to help users better identify benthic macroinvertebrates commonly found in streams and other waterways. In Summer 2021, the app and other supplemental materials were highlighted during trainings for educators held at the Stroud Water Research Center. The evaluation team from Rockman et al Cooperative (REA) surveyed...

This is the summative evaluation report for the “Understanding the Physics of Collaborative Design and Play,” a collaboration between researchers and children’s museum practitioners to design and build a physics-based children’s museum exhibit to provide opportunities for children and their caregivers to tinker with play related to the STEM concepts of momentum, mass, velocity, friction, and balance in the context...

The KQED science news team began a study with Texas Tech University to find out whether stories aimed at generating “awe” would drive deeper engagement with news features. From a preliminary study the team learned people can feel experiences like connectedness and vastness, not only through images but through a written story. The team intended to write their own science...

KQED, the Northern California PBS and NPR member station, and the College of Media & Communication at Texas Tech University have recently completed a $3 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for the project Cracking the Code (CTC): Influencing Millennial Science Engagement. The three-year grant provided funding for an unprecedented science media research initiative between science media professionals...

KQED, the Northern California PBS and NPR member station, and the College of Media & Communication at Texas Tech University have recently completed a $3 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for the project Cracking the Code (CTC): Influencing Millennial Science Engagement. The three-year grant provided funding for an unprecedented science media research initiative between science media professionals...

From 2019 to 2021, Knology undertook a project called Addressing Societal Challenges through STEM, which investigated how informal learning institutions are advancing the use of STEM knowledge and scientific reasoning to enable individuals, families, and communities to understand what they can do, and apply their learning to solving critical societal challenges. The literature reviewed (237 studies and articles) documented an emerging...

The education research component of the Pulsar Search Collaboratory (PSC) seeks to determine how the PSC experience affects the science identity and STEM career intentions of its participants and how individual programmatic elements influence persistence. These questions are investigated by comparing pre-­‐survey and post-­‐survey results and by examining the participant’s interaction with the PSC online portal. This report d pre/posistilled t...

This report presents findings from the evaluation of four Pulsar Search Collaboratory (PSC) activities: online training, use of website, capstone events at hub institutions, and the PSC summer camp. ...

This is the final annual report for the AISL project: Collaborative Research: Developing STEM self-efficacy and science identities through authentic astrophysics research in online and face-to-face environments (STEM-ID). Impact Statement: At 100 meters in diameter, the Green Bank Telescope (GBT) in Pocahontas County, West Virginia, is the largest radio telescope in the United States. It is also one of the most sensitive...

DiscoverE hired Concord Evaluation Group (CEG) to conduct an independent evaluation of the Future City program. Future City has been operating since 1992. According to DiscoverE, the Future City program is “a national, project-based learning experience where students in 6th, 7th, and 8th grade imagine, design, and build cities of the future. Students work as a team with an educator...

KQED, a San Francisco based public media organization, is interested in broadening participation and attracting and engaging a younger and more diverse audience, especially millennials, for their science media. The KQED science team is one of the largest reporting teams in the West with a focus on science news and it’s YouTube series, Deep Look.   This is a summary of Cracking the...

This is the third of three guides for media practitioners, evaluators and researchers about some of what was learned through the project Cracking the Code: Influencing Millennial Science Engagement.  This guide focuses on steps for conducting media research and research protocals.     ...

This is the second of three guides for media practitioners, evaluators and researchers about some of what was learned through the project Cracking the Code: Influencing Millennial Science Engagement.  This guide focuses on ways to identify your missing audience.   ...

This is the first of three guides for media practioners, evaluators and researchers about some of what was learned through the project Cracking the Code: Influencing Millennial Science Engagement.  This guide focuses on possible practices for creating an audience research collaboration for media professionals, evaluators and communication researchers. ...

The Formative Evaluation for the Mars Habitat exhibit was conducted to gather visitor feedback on a prototype of the exhibit component. Data was collected in three rounds, and the exhibit component was updated as necessary between rounds. Evaluation questions focused on understanding if visitors knew what to do while at the Mars Habitat exhibit, how visitors interacted with both the exhibit...

The series of articles below is a study of Cracking the Code, one of the largest public investments in science media, journalism and science communication research collaborations, a project between KQED, Texas Tech and Yale Universities. KQED has the largest science reporting unit in the West focusing on science news and features including their YouTube series Deep Look.This series was written by Scott Burg...